The past week or so has found me coming up to speed on Ruby on Rails. I am developing portions of the site using RoR, and it’s been interesting so far. Ruby on Rails (RoR) is an open source web framework. The tag line is “convention over configuration,” meaning it’s designed to maximize out-of-the-box common web app functionality, but it allows you to customize/override anything you don’t like. It’s based on Ruby, an interpreted, OO scripting language.

I chose RoR because designed with the programmer in mind – it’s extremely powerful, but it makes no apologies for those who do not understand the fundamentals of distributed web application development, automated builds, and test-driven development. I feel that the learning curve has been relatively steep, more on the web app side than anything else. That said, as someone with a strong Java background, I like the evolutionary step that Ruby has taken and feel comfortable with the tools – Rake vs. Ant, Test::Unit instead of JUnit, etc.

I’m reading a book called Rails for Java Developers and I highly recommend it if you are a Java developer and want to learn RoR – relevant, concise, with an excellent comparison between Java and RoR approaches.